Topic: Archives
I have recently begun a project which will likely take a couple of years to finish. Frustrated by the in many cases rather chaotic arrangement of EAA 278 and LVVA, fond 7349 I have started to work on a index of documents in the archive of the Livonian Governor General. Thus far I have covered EAA. 278.1.XIX-68 (Letters from governors and commandants in Narva 1691-1699), EAA. 278.1.XIX-74 (Letters to Paul von Strokirch 1699-1702), EAA.278.1.XX-18 (Letters concerning the war in Livonia 1700-1709) and EAA.278.1.XX-19 (Letters from Livonian clergymen 1700-1708) - in all about 270 letters. To begin with I am just registering "From", "to", "place", "date", "volume no" and "page no" - it would simply take an eternity to make summaries of the content.
Just from this small sample it's clear that a lot is missing. In XIX-68 there are for example only a dozen letters from the period 1696-1699. One reason for this is, I believe, the fact that the historian Carl Schirren was very interested in anything which concerned Swedish-Russian relations in the years just before 1700 and got permission to take documents from the archive. Volume XX-18 is in many ways no less mysterious. It contains a very haphazard collection of letters from a limited number of correspondents. Notable is that a few of them are from the period covered in Bienemann's work Die Katastrophe der Stadt Dorpat während des Nordischen Krieges (1902), but not mentioned by him. The same is in fact true of some letters among the Malmberg papers (Uppsala University Library), which perhaps suggest that these volumes had not been yet arranged when Bienemann prepared his book.
